This just in from news.yahoo.com:
California could have a $15-an-hour statewide minimum wage, the largest statewide minimum wage by far, by 2022, a state senator has said, but only if state lawmakers and labor unions can get the tentative deal through the legislature.
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But there remains opposition to raising the minimum wage. Some studies suggest it would hurt low-wage workers more than it helps them by triggering layoffs. Republicans in Congress have made similar arguments in blocking recent efforts to raise the federal minimum wage.
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A law passed this month in Oregon seeks to address that issue, slowly raising the minimum wage for six years along three tiers: to $14.75 an hour in urban areas, $13.50 in smaller cities, and $12.50 [everyone else].
Similar policies around the country, Third Way wrote in its report, "would ensure that a cashier in Manhattan is essentially earning the same minimum wage in real terms as a cashier in Carbondale, Ill., and largely addresses fears that a big city minimum wage would destroy jobs in low-cost small towns."
Divide and conquer. Pit small towns against Mega-cities. Set those wealthy cashiers against those more frugal cashiers. And make sure everyone is deathly afraid — that asking for a living wage is paramount to losing their wonderful jobs. THAT is the Third Way of conducting Business in America. We mustn’t upset that Chamber of Commerce apple-cart. (So pay no attention to the cart owners ...)
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by Joon Suh, thirdway.org/report — February 11, 2016
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We propose to replace the single federal minimum wage with a regional minimum wage based on average hourly wages and regional cost variations, with readjustments every three years. To do this, we would establish different regional wages — for low-cost regions, high-cost regions, and regions that are at parity with the national average. If implemented today, we estimate that regional minimum wages across the country will range from $9.30 per hour to $11.90 per hour.
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The cost differences between one area of the country and another are aggregated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the U.S. Department of Commerce and reported in the form of Regional Price Parities (RPPs).13 RPPs are expressed as a percentage of the national average of the cost of common consumer goods and services. A score of 100 on the RPP represents the national price average. So, an area with an RPP of 110 experiences costs that are 10% higher than the national average. Residents of an area with an RPP of 85 experience costs that are 15% lower than the national average.
RPPs can be used to calculate purchasing power, which is what a dollar of wages in one area of the country is worth compared to another area of the country, given differences in local prices.14
Sounds like a lot like implementing an Austerity-ratcheting mechanism to me. What’s to ensure that “common basket of consumer goods and services”, actually reflects the real world costs and expenses that working people are confronted with everyday? Costs like Tuition; costs like Health care Deductibles; costs like quality Day Care; costs like quality elder-care; costs like every-rising rents, well beyond the “local” rates of inflation.
Do those Third Way formulas for “down-sizing our expectations” — one Demographic Segment at a time — ever take into account those intangible Quality of Life factors like those listed above? Or would they rather just shame us into being compliant, uncomplaining, worker drones … happy with whatever profit-crumbs they episodically might throw our way. If we’re lucky, and the next trade deal doesn’t take our meager jobs away first.
Or as yet another Third Way booster puts it …
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The populists are right that important institutions have been woefully unresponsive to these changes. A recent Casey Foundation report found that 82 percent of African American and 79 percent of Latino fourth-graders are reading below proficient levels. How are they being prepared for the new economy? Nearly 10.2 million young people in America are not in school or in the workplace. How did they fall between the sidewalk cracks of American life? Colleges and universities in the United States graduate only about half the students who enter, leaving many in debt and without a diploma to show for it.
What is Sanders’s liberal populist answer to these challenges? He wants to increase Social Security benefits for everyone, including the wealthy; he wants free college education for everyone, without a serious emphasis on quality; he wants to break up the big banks; and he wants a single-payer health-care system.
“What kind of guts does it show to promise people free things?” asks Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank. The centerpiece ideas of the Sanders campaign could have been proposed by Hubert Humphrey in the 1960s. Sanders would massively expand the commitments of 20th-century liberalism, defiantly un-updated for 21st-century challenges. His campaign is progressive nostalgia in concentrated form.
So in other words, dare not to dream of a equitable society, Progressives. Dare not to demand better, ever. Dare not to expect profit-sharing for a lifetime of scrimping and saving, and mind-numbing labors, for the benefit of the owners. Perish the thought.
Dare to only aspire to what’s practicable, what’s saleable to the Powers that Be. Trust the Third Way president, to negotiate for you, what you really need — what you really deserve. Let the Third Way think-tankists define your RPP’s Life’s worth, in their eyes.
And be happy for their efforts, or we might not even get those. It’s not like we “deserve it” or something — you nostalgic dreamers:
Now get back to work, you slackers!
Or those Third Way thinkers, just might re-calibrate their goals, for your labors, and not for the better either.